Disabling Wayland backend under Linux

[lorenzodallavecchia]

Since SWT and the Equinox launcher itself have issues with Wayland, a common workaround is to force using the legacy X11 backend under Linux.

One way to do that is starting the launcher with this environment variable.

GDK_BACKEND=x11

The hassle here is that you have to provide some kind of wrapper launcher/script to make this transparent for the user.
AFAIK the launcher does not support setting environment variables (it was proposed in #129 and #143, but both issues were auto-closed for inactivity).

The documentation launcher_issues.md documentation references the system property org.eclipse.swt.internal.gtk.disableWayland, but that property does not exist anywhere and it doesn't work. I suspect it may be a Copilot hallucination.

[akurtakov]

Some distros (latest Fedora and Ubuntu) no longer ship X11 DE (XWayland is still an option but it has biggest problems of wayland - location setting specifically) the anymore so sticking to X11 will always have to be opt-in for users. Also GDK_BACKEND has to be set before gtk_init is called, which limits the potential places to do it in SWT/launcher. Still it is probably doable but with no clear gains from my POV.
Would you please point to Wayland issues you are facing?

[lorenzodallavecchia]

The big issue in my case is eclipse-platform/eclipse.platform.swt#635. That SWT bug completely breaks a custom widget that uses the SWT-AWT bridge.

Apart from that, there are a couple of smaller/trivial issues that I could totally bear.

• The workspace selection dialog is sometimes "truncated", so that you can not even see the confirm button to continue launching.
• The splash screen is not centered (I think this is the only real issue with the launcher itself).